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Matt Brown, co-owner of Denver’s new My 420 Tours, looks over a sampling of marijuana edibles Thursday at a dispensary in Denver. My 420 Tours gives traveling pot users everything but the drug. Brown has sold 160 tour packages to visiting pot smokers for the April 20 weekend.

DENVER — Thousands of people are expected to join an unofficial counterculture holiday celebrating marijuana in Colorado and Washington this coming weekend, including out-of staters and even packaged tours. The events and crowds will test the limits of new laws permitting pot use by adults.

More than 50,000 are expected to light up outdoors in Denver’s Civic Center Park on April 20 to celebrate marijuana legalization. Thousands more are headed here for the nation’s first open-to-all Cannabis Cup, April 20-21, a domestic version of an annual marijuana contest and celebration in Amsterdam. Expected guests at the Cannabis Cup, a ticketed event taking place inside the Denver Convention Center, include Snoop Lion, the new reggae- and marijuana-loving persona for the rapper better known as Snoop Dogg.

Marijuana activists from New York to San Francisco consider April 20 a day to celebrate the drug and push for broader legalization. The origins of the number “420″ as a code for pot are murky, but the drug’s users have for decades marked the date 4/20 as a day to use pot together.

Marijuana remains illegal under federal law, and its sale without a doctor’s recommendation isn’t allowed yet in Colorado or Washington. Neither state allows open and public use of the drug. But authorities largely look the other way at public pot-smoking, especially at festivals and concerts, and entrepreneurs are finding creative ways to capitalize on new marijuana laws.

One of them is Matt Brown, co-owner of Denver’s new My 420 Tours, which gives traveling pot users everything but the drug. Brown has sold 160 tour packages to visiting pot smokers for the April 20 weekend. Prices start at $499, not including hotel or air.

The tour sends cannabis tour guides to pick up marijuana tourists at the airport in limousines, escort them to Cannabis Cup and other Denver-area marijuana celebrations and deposit them at a hotel where smoking — tobacco or reefer — is permitted on room patios.

Marijuana tourists on Brown’s tour can add extra days of touring medical marijuana dispensaries and commercial growing operations. A cannabis cooking class is another option. Five-day tours run $649 to $849.

Brown, a medical marijuana patient who is new to the travel business, says his tours will enable sharing of pot but not selling it. Eighty percent of his clients are coming from outside Colorado — meaning it’s illegal for them to bring marijuana from home. And because commercial pot sales in Colorado don’t start until January, out-of-state visitors can’t yet buy pot at Colorado’s 500-plus dispensaries.

Despite the legal barriers, Brown said his tours quickly filled to capacity and he had to turn away would-be cannabis tourists. He’s hoping to book future pot-themed weekends if the April 20th weekend does well.

“People are fascinated by what’s happening here, and they want to see it up close,” Brown said. “We want to make sure people don’t come here, land at the airport, rent a car and drive around stoned all weekend.”

The tour group isn’t affiliated with the Cannabis Cup, sponsored by High Times Magazine, which has run similar events for medical marijuana in nine cities. The magazine’s editorial director, Dan Skye, says this month’s U.S. Cannabis Cup was timed for the April 20 weekend.

“4/20 is the national stoner holiday, for lack of a better word,” Skye said. “It gets bigger every year, and this year, after the legalization votes, it’s going to be absolutely huge.”

The magazine planned to award Snoop Lion with a “lifetime achievement” award at a Denver ceremony Friday. A Cypress Hill/Slightly Stoopid concert was planned Saturday at the iconic Red Rocks Amphitheater just west of Denver. Both events sold out weeks ago.

A few dozen miles northwest of Denver, the University of Colorado in Boulder will try to dampen pot celebrations on April 20. The campus once held the nation’s largest college 4/20 celebration, drawing an estimated 10,000 in 2010. The legendary smokeout was cited by Playboy magazine when it named Colorado the nation’s top party school in 2011 .

After the Playboy mention, the university stepped up efforts to shut the celebration down. Campus officials last year roped off the site of the smokeout, Norlin Quadrangle, reducing the 4/20 crowd to a few hundred protesters. The school planned another shutdown Saturday.

Celebrations were planned in Washington state, too, though April 20 isn’t as broadly celebrated as Seattle’s annual Hempfest, which draws hundreds of thousands of people to a waterfront park every summer.

The April 20 celebrations in Washington included a Seattle party being put on by DOPE Magazine at an artist work space and studio. About 1,500 were expected for glassblowing demonstrations, music, dancing and a bar where revelers can vaporize their pot, plus the judging for the “DOPE Cup” — an award for the best bud. There will be a smoking tent set up outside, along with food trucks to combat any cases of the munchies.

“It’s pretty monumental,” said DOPE editor in chief James Zachodni. “This is the first time in the U.S. there’s been a cannabis holiday with a legal aspect to it.”

Back in Colorado, longtime pot user Andrew Poarch says this year’s April 20 observations in Colorado have taken on epic significance. He’s joining dozens of friends to hire a bus from Colorado Springs to attend Denver’s Cannabis Cup.

“It’s going to be a lot bigger, a lot more people,” he predicted. “People are trying to outdo themselves because it’s a party and a celebration. We beat prohibition. It’s a pretty big deal.”

If you are familiar with the skit at the end of the 1999 Nas song “Come Get Me” off the Nastradamus album, then you are somewhat familiar with hydro drops. Back then, it was a little known secret amongst New York’s underground pot culture, but today it is quickly becoming Americas favorite way to consume cannabis. From being easy to hide, safe, tasty and cheap, it is no wonder this new form of consuming cannabis is sweeping the nation.

One of the benefits of using hydro drops is the almost instant effects of the marijuana when consumed this way. As opposed to smoking it or eating it, as soon as you put one single hydro drop under your tongue it is rapidly absorbed into the arterial system and quickly spreads to the brain and throughout the body within seconds causing a sudden burst of euphoria that lasts up to 6 hours. And the taste is amazing, if you make your batch of hydro drops with cherry kush or lemon haze, it tastes like cherry kush or lemon haze and not burnt plant matter. If you prefer no flavor, simply use regular weed. Unless you have some super bad fucked up dry brown dirt garbage ass weed, it will all get you high the same when made into hydro drops; just different flavors.

Another benefit of hydro drops is that it is completely harmless. It does not damage your body in any way, shape or form. If you are a smoker, your lungs will restore back to normal if you switch ot hydro drops within a few months. All you get from hyrdo drops are the medicinal effects of the marijuana and the “high” effect of the THC. During the production of hydro drops all harmful chemicals that may have been used to grow the weed are destroyed and there is no second hand smoke or bad odors to annoy others with. It also makes the weed in the liquid untraceable to the highly sensitive noses of sniffing narc dogs.

One of the major benefits is the financial one. One $20 bottle of hydro drops can last a moderate smoker up to a week if he switched, where as that same moderate smoker would be paying up to $40 per day purchasing dimes of sour diesel or purple kush. A whole jar of hydro drops can last a moderate marijuana consumer up to 6 months and only costs about $100 to make. And if you take a break and never use it all, hydro drops will last forever in the bottle or jar for whenever you are ready to start back up again.

This stuff is mad easy to make. There’s 2 varieties:

1. Dirty Hyrdo Drops – Hydro drops made with high proof liquor. The best Dirty Hydro Drops are made with 180 proof Everclear.

If you can’t find that, then you can just use highest proof vodka you can find. Some people even use Bacardi 151 or flavored vodkas like coconut or grape Ciroc to make various taste combinations. A bonus of using dirty hydro drops is you can get fucked up 2 ways if you really wanted to, like banging back shot glasses full of hydro drops. But if you want to be able to pass a breathalyzer test or your religion restricts the use of alcohol (muslims) you are better off using clean hydro drops.

2. Clean Hydro Drops – Hydro drops made with vegetable glycerin.

Vegetable glycerin is widely available and is completely safe for consumption. A bonus of using clean hydro drops is the ability to be fucked up without smelling like or feeling the effects of alcohol. You also taste nothing but the weed strain that was used to produce it, making clean hydro drops a delicious treat.

Now once you’ve figured out whether you’re going to make a dirty batch or clean batch and you have your desired liquid, you need to now get your hand on and ounce of weed and a weed grinder. Pick the your desired flavor weed and grind that shit up nice and good like this:

Now that you got an ounce worth of ground up weed, toss it in a jar like so:

Now dump your clean or dirty liquid on up in there like this here:

Make sure you fill it up to the top. Once you’re topped off, screw the lid on and shake it up vigorously for about 10 minutes. When your’re done shaking it should look like this:

Now comes the hard part. Waiting. Put the jar away somewhere for 2 weeks and wait for the THC to be extracted. Check on it every day, making sure to shake it vigorously at least every 2 days and if you see it drying out you can add more liquid.

After 2 weeks, it’s ready. You need to strain the liquid out from the plant matter to avoid chunks with a coffee strainer or any other strainer or straining bag. You can strain a little at a time leaving the rest to age. As it ages it becomes more potent and tastes better. It never used, it will last forever only becoming better with time. You can also strain the whole batch by placing a strainer over a bucket like so:

Dump the whole thing into that strainer and literally squeeze out every last hydro drop. Once you’re done with that, pour the liquid on the bottom of the bucket back into a clean jar like this:

Once you’re done, then you have a full jar of hydro drops to get fucked up with:

Now you can fill some of these bottles up:

And have your very own official Hydro Drops. If you ain’t got the time to make them, just demand them at your local smoke shop or weed spot! You can thank me later.